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On Feb. 3, 2022, just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian navy conducted mysterious exercises in a surprising location: off the Irish coast. Coincidentally, of course, the exercises took place directly above a point dense with trans-Atlantic data cables, three quarters of which pass near Ireland. These were not routine exercises, and Russia did not ask for permission to conduct them, but the incident exposed Ireland’s inability to deter attacks on waters within its exclusive economic zone.
Despite being an island, Ireland has never developed a defense commensurate with its wealth or importance to the global economy. Its navy has six small ships, and its air corps—not yet a full-fledged air force—has no fighter jets.
On Feb. 3, 2022, just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian navy conducted mysterious exercises in a surprising location: off the Irish coast. Coincidentally, of course, the exercises took place directly above a point dense with trans-Atlantic data cables, three quarters of which pass near Ireland. These were not routine exercises, and Russia did not ask for permission to conduct them, but the incident exposed Ireland’s inability to deter attacks on waters within its exclusive economic zone.
Despite being an island, Ireland has never developed a defense commensurate with its wealth or importance to the global economy. Its navy has six small ships, and its air corps—not yet a full-fledged air force—has no fighter jets.
The Russian exercises demonstrated how critical Ireland has become to Europe’s economy, thus making it a target for Russian military harassment. Its role in international data transfer infrastructure places it at the center of the European strategic theater in a way it was not during the Cold War.
Given this new reality—and the fact that Ireland’s immigrant population today has strong ties to the countries most threatened by a revanchist Russia—Ireland needs a major rethink of its defense plans. But doing so will require letting go of certain ideas that have long governed how it conceives of its security.
Among European countries, Ireland has a rather unusual alignment. Though it has been politically allied with the United States since independence in 1921, Ireland declared military neutrality at the outbreak of World War II. Openly siding with the Allies would have risked both a German invasion and a British counterinvasion, neither of which the new state, free for just 18 years, could have hoped to repel. This specific neutrality eventually evolved during the Cold War into a broader pacifism that purported to position Ireland between the United States and the Soviet Union, notwithstanding the ironclad anti-communism of its Catholic population.
The idea that Ireland’s neutrality in World War II prevented it from joining a military alliance such as NATO eventually became conventional wisdom in Ireland. But this was a myth. Though Ireland did not join NATO, its reason was its dispute with the United Kingdom over control of Northern Ireland, not opposition to an anti-communist alliance. In fact, Ireland suggested a separate, binding defense treaty with the United States in 1949. In an exchange of letters with officials in Washington that year, the Irish government insisted that Ireland “has remained, to a greater extent than any other European State, immune from the spread of Communism. … [W]ith the general aim of the proposed Treaty, the Irish Government is in agreement.”
Though there was no tradition of not joining military alliances, Ireland eventually came to embrace the stance later. The principle that applied during World War II was resurrected during the Cold War to bolster Ireland’s legitimacy in diplomatic initiatives such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and in U.N. peacekeeping missions between the 1960s and 1980s. Neutrality afforded Ireland significant soft power and allowed it to present itself as both European and anti-colonial.
Controversy returned a few decades later as the European Union started to develop a military component through the Treaty of Nice in 2001, followed in 2007 by the Treaty of Lisbon. In Ireland, opponents argued that adopting the treaties would commit Ireland to joining a European military alliance. To defray such concerns, and to ensure that it could ratify the 2007 treaty, Ireland secured an opt-out from a common European defense that allowed it to maintain a veto over the deployment of its own troops, even as the common defense denied EU members such a veto.
In addition to the opt-out, Ireland increased the political salience of a long-standing policy on force deployment that became known as the “triple lock,” which prevents the deployment of the Irish army overseas unless three conditions are satisfied: a U.N. Security Council or General Assembly resolution, a formal decision by the Irish government, and a resolution by the lower house of Ireland’s parliament. It is, however, a narrowly drawn restriction, and it doesn’t prevent Ireland from joining common procurement projects, such as the EU’s PESCO military cooperation initiative, or relieve it from mutual defense obligations.
Today, Ireland remains one of only four EU countries that are not members of NATO. Though its neighbors have tolerated Ireland’s nonmembership, they are now much more concerned with the country’s practical inability to defend itself against harassment from Russia. If NATO membership remains off the political agenda for the moment, changes in Ireland’s deployment policy and defense spending are afoot.
New legislation is planned to remove the U.N. Security Council requirement because Ireland doesn’t want Russia or China to be able to veto the deployment of its forces. Proposals to replace this part of the triple lock include only requiring the sign-off of a “regional organization,” which obviously includes the EU but could conceivably include NATO, too.
These changes in Irish posture, expected in the coming year, have not yet, however, been matched by sufficient changes in budgets.
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine, Ireland conducted a review of its defense posture that set out three levels of ambition, or LOAs, for its defense forces. The current government was only able to win support to adopt LOA 2, which would provide a defense budget of 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) by 2028. This plan will raise defense expenditure to 0.56 percent of modified GNI—an indicator designed to take into account that Ireland is a base for many multinational headquarters and the international aircraft leasing industry, which distort GDP figures—up from 0.42 percent.
Ireland is due to hold elections on Nov. 29, and should opinion polls prove correct, Fine Gael, the party most in favor of defense reform, is likely to win, though it will need support from current partner Fianna Fail and possibly also the Green Party for a parliamentary majority. Such a government will face pressure because of the more dangerous international situation, as well as from allies who feel that wealthy Ireland should make a greater contribution to the defense of an economic system that produces this wealth, to increase the country’s defense effort. This would prompt Ireland to order combat jets and increase the navy’s size from six to 12 ships. It would also increase the defense budget to 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) per year, or 1.13 percent of modified GNI. This was what the 2022 review assessed as the minimum required for Ireland to achieve LOA 3 and maintain a full-spectrum capability to defend its coastal waters, offshore wind energy potential, and trans-Atlantic cables from sabotage. Ireland’s defense posture reviews and related documents rarely mention likely enemies by name, but a large, cold one on the Eurasian continent was undoubtedly on their writers’ minds.
Yet even these plans have now become outdated following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The next government must consider what an LOA 4 would look like: sufficient to provide full-spectrum defense capabilities appropriate to a small maritime country and to contribute to common European defense and security.
To understand what a further increase could achieve, 2 percent of modified GNI corresponds to a budget of 5.3 billion euros ($5.6 billion) a year, nearly the same as Finland’s military budget (and around a fifth of Ireland’s projected budget surplus this year).
Ireland’s defense needs are, naturally, very different from those of Finland, which has a long land border with Russia. Priority should be given to maritime defense tasks and equipment that can be of use both for protecting European seas as well as Ireland’s own, including anti-submarine warfare and modern air defense, which Ireland doesn’t currently possess. The Russia-Ukraine war has shown the increasing importance of uncrewed systems in naval warfare, including submersibles and sea drones, as well as uncrewed aircraft, essential for protecting renewable energy infrastructure.
Given Ireland’s highly competitive labor market (the starting annual salary for a junior officer is around 50,000 euros, or about $53,000), investment in automation of military systems appears necessary for economic reasons, too. In the longer term, Ireland might even think of cooperating in the United Kingdom’s Type 83 destroyer program, a powerful new surface ship able to defend against submarine and air attack. If the ships were built in Belfast—now that the Good Friday Agreement has settled the conflict in Northern Ireland, unlike in 1949—that would allow an Irish one to become a symbol of U.K.-Irish cooperation.
Adopting such a defense policy will, however, require Ireland to convince its citizens with a new political argument: its role in European security. During the Cold War, the combination of military nonalignment and political embedding in the Western world made sense for a relatively poor country still under heavy British influence. But that time has passed. If 20th-century Ireland was principally focused on the English-speaking world, 21st-century Ireland is now decidedly more European, including its population. Just as Ireland’s own freedom was helped by its diaspora in the United States, so it should commit to the freedom of East-Central Europe, so much of whose diaspora now lives in Ireland. Its defense posture and budget should reflect this new, European reality.